Donald Trump and the far right have spent a considerable amount of time amplifying a conspiracy theory that immigrants are coming into America to replace white Americans, and he has recently expanded that theory to play on fears and divide Black people and immigrants.
According to Bloomberg, Trump claimed in an interview published on July 16 that “The Black people are going to be decimated by the millions of people that are coming into the country.”
Trump continued, “There will never be a decimation like this, and they’re already feeling it. Their wages have gone way down. Their jobs are being taken by the migrants coming in illegally into the country.”
Trump’s words echo the Great Replacement Theory, which notoriously spurred
neo-Nazis and Klan members to march and terrorize students and residents in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, chanting “Jews will not replace us.”Today, Trump’s unsubstantiated claims only got more hyperbolic from there, as he went on to claim that, “The Black population in this country is going to die because of what’s happened, what’s going to happen to their jobs — their jobs, their housing, everything. I want to stop that…They’re taking everything.”
Trump’s rambling long-form interview was, of course, fact-checked by Bloomberg, and they noted that Trump’s claim that 100% of the people employed by Biden are migrants was not supported by statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“Employment gains since 2018 have almost
entirely come from non-native-born workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but those numbers are largely naturalized US citizens and legal residents—not migrants. The trend also reflects a shrinking native-born working-age population.”Trump also repeated a false claim, one he has repeated several times, about countries sending individuals with criminal backgrounds. According to the fact checkers, “There is no evidence for this claim, according to the Annenberg Public Policy Center, which quoted a US border official who said ‘a very small amount’ of migrants have criminal backgrounds.”
Trump’s comments harken back to his “Black jobs” remarks at the June 17 Presidential Debate on CNN and his statement during a December 2023 rally in New Hampshire, where he claimed immigrants are poisoning the blood of America — a remark that drew widespread comparisons to Adolf Hitler and the rhetoric of Nazi Germany.
According to NBC News, the Biden campaign released a statement decrying Trump’s use of the phrase. “Donald Trump channeled his role models as he parroted Adolf Hitler, praised Kim Jong Un, and quoted Vladimir Putin while running for president on a promise to rule as a dictator and threaten American democracy. Trump is not shying away from his plan to lock up millions of people into detention camps and continues to lie about that time when Joe Biden obliterated him by over 7 million votes three years ago.”
Chris Christie, a Republican, said that the larger problem was members of the Republican Party that went along with Trump’s claims. “He’s disgusting, and what he’s doing is dog-whistle to Americans who feel absolutely under stress and strained from the economy and from the conflicts around the world, and he’s dog-whistling to blame it on people from areas that don’t look like us,” Christie said. “The other problem with this is the Republicans who are saying this is OK.”
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